Mother of accused teen hitman charged in SD

14-year-old has been tied to Mexican drug cartel

Update

U.S. consular officials have met with both sisters of Edgar Jimenez Lugo, the U.S. State Department said Wednesday.

Lina-Ericka Jimenez Lugo, 23, and Elizabeth Jimenez Lugo, 19, are being held in a Mexico City detention facility for 30 days while the investigation continues into their ties to organized crime.

U.S. officials are also working to verify the citizenship of the sisters, a State Department spokeswoman said. San Diego County birth registration documents obtained by The San Diego Union-Tribune show Lina-Ericka was born in Jiutepec, Mexico, and Elizabeth was born in San Diego.

— Kristina Davis

A 14-year-old suspected of working as a killer for a drug cartel while under the custody of Mexican army soldiers in the city of Cuernavaca, Mexico, Dec. 3, 2010.— Antonio Sierra

+Read Caption

A 14-year-old suspected of working as a killer for a drug cartel while under the custody of Mexican army soldiers in the city of Cuernavaca, Mexico, Dec. 3, 2010.
/ Antonio Sierra

The mother of a suspected 14-year-old Mexican drug cartel assassin has been charged in San Diego with entering the United States illegally, according to a federal complaint filed Wednesday.

Neighbors said they watched Monday night as Yolanda Jimenez Lugo, 43, and her husband were led away in handcuffs in front of their distraught young daughters as Jimenez returned from an exercise class. Officials blocked access to the small street where she and her family have lived for about eight years.

The complaint stated that she had been previously deported on September 10, 1997, and had not applied for permission to return to the U.S. She and her husband, Gabriel Aguirre Manuel, were taken to the Border Patrol’s Chula Vista station for processing.

Information about a court date has not been released.

U.S. consular officials also met with Edgar Jimenez Lugo, the boy jailed on accusations of being a hit man for a cartel in central Mexico, the U.S. State Department confirmed Tuesday. He is being held at an undisclosed location for his protection.

Details of the meeting were not released, and his U.S. citizenship has not yet been verified. He was carrying a San Diego County document registering his birth in San Diego when he was arrested, but the county clerk’s office could not locate the document this week.

The teen was apprehended Thursday at an airport on the outskirts of Cuernavaca, the capital of the state of Morelos. He and his sister Elizabeth Jimenez Lugo, 19, were preparing to fly to Tijuana and then cross into the United States to be with their mother in San Diego.

Both were arrested as was their sister, Lina-Ericka Jimenez Lugo, 23, who had dropped them off at the airport.

Yolanda Jimenez Lugo briefly spoke to two reporters for The San Diego Union-Tribune outside her apartment Monday afternoon but did not identify herself. Neighbors confirmed Tuesday she is the mother of Edgar and his two sisters.

San Diego County court records show that in 1997, a year after Edgar was born, Yolanda Jimenez Lugo and a co-defendant pleaded guilty to one count of possessing rock cocaine with the intent to sell. Both were sentenced to 90 days in jail and three years’ probation.

The sentencing records indicated she was not a U.S. citizen and could be deported.

Two years later, county birth documents used in adoptions listed Carmen Solis Gil, the children’s paternal grandmother, as the mother of Edgar and Lina-Ericka. A birth certificate for Elizabeth also lists Solis, who was born in 1926, as her mother.

When Edgar was a baby, his father brought the boy and five siblings from San Diego to Jiutepec, an industrial suburb of Cuernavaca, to live with Solis, according to a close relative who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation. Solis has since died.

“The boy loved her very much, and we watched how he would hug her as if she was his mother,” the relative said.

Neighbors of the children in Mexico said the father had remarried.

After arriving in Mexico, Edgar enrolled in school but was expelled when he was 7 or 8 after punching a small girl and picking fights with other children, said gym teacher Daniel Franco, 35.

“He was a neglected child,” Franco said. “The principal looked after him a lot, flattered him and called him ‘my Ponchi.’ ” The boy’s relative said the family gave him that name when he was a pudgy 4-year-old.

He typically got to school on his own in a disheveled state, Franco said, but his older sisters occasionally attended meetings there with him.

Edgar gravitated toward spending time around older boys, the teacher said. He was a fixture on the neighborhood streets, sometimes awaiting friends outside the school’s graffiti-sprayed walls after class.

“It’s difficult to believe that he has been so cruel, that he was slashing throats and dismembering people,” Franco said. “Yes, he did have a bad streak.”

His mother, meanwhile, began a new life in San Diego. Jimenez moved about eight years ago to the Logan Heights apartment where she was taken into custody Monday night. She shared the home with two young daughters and their father, Aguirre, whom she married in 2008.

Jimenez sold Avon in the neighborhood. She also frequently knocked on doors to invite neighbors to church and to talk about God, according to a family friend who did not want to be named for fear of becoming a cartel target. The friend, who has a daughter about the same age as Jimenez’s elementary school-aged girls, said the two would sometimes attend church together.

The manager of the apartment building where the family lived said, “We’re all worried about her. I never had problems with them.”

Neighbors and the family friend said Elizabeth and Lina-Ericka visited their mother in San Diego in recent years.

About two years ago, the daughters spent several months with their mother and occasionally picked up their half-sisters from a nearby school, the family friend said.

A neighbor said Jimenez frequently expressed that she wanted Elizabeth to move to San Diego to find work, a neighbor said. She rarely spoke of her son.

Videos surfaced last month of Edgar and other teens claiming to be drug cartel killers. In Mexico, the military was hunting for the alleged child assassin, even barging into a baptism party of a cousin, the relative in Mexico said. Authorities returned to the house two days later, nearly breaking down the gate and checking under a bed for the boy, the relative said.

Authorities say Edgar and Elizabeth Jimenez Lugo were working for Julio “El Negro” Padilla, who has been fighting for control of the drug trade in Morelos, formerly part of the Beltran Leyva gang’s territory.

The sisters are being held in Mexico City for 30 days on suspicion of ties to organized crime, according to the Mexican Attorney General’s Office.

tanya.sierra@uniontrib.com (619) 293-1705

Staff writer Morgan Lee, reporting from Cuernavaca, Mexico, and The Associated Press contributed to this report.